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Saturday, April 20, 2013

Nine Patch Snowball

Last year I began cutting a few project remnants into 2.25 inch squares. But by the time there were enough I was in a machine quilting funk. My sketchbook was boring; I couldn't quilt designs I'd previously mastered. I wallowed in this misery for a week. Boring, tiring and non-productive.

Google searches led to Leah Day's Free Motion Quilting Project. Making small samples didn't appeal. Finally I realized I could make a nine-patch snowball quilt which would:

Use up scraps

Have small areas similar to Leah's samples

Give me a warmup piece to practice on before moving to larger quilts AND

Finish a quilt for the ready-to-go stack.

Nine-Patch Snowball Scrap Quilt

How to make this quilt:

Cut 353 squares 2.25". Use the Value Finder to sort the squares by value, keeping only lights and mediums (Gray Scale 9-4.) Darks go back into storage.

By cutting the border muslin slightly wider, the star points finish 1/4"before the edge of the quilt. Now you don't have to bind exactly to those points. Let it float a bit! Easier.

Step 5

Pressed snowball block

Step 6 (second part)

Additional information: I made this completely from scraps but if you need to buy something, here's the yardage I calculated.

1 yard muslin for the top

1.125 yards for the back (it's 41' by 41")

0.33 yard (12 inches) for binding (quarter inch double fold)

1.375 yards assorted scraps for the squares and triangles

Wouldn't six inch blocks be easier? Perhaps. However, this quilt finishes just under 41 inches, so the back can be made from one width of fabric. With six inch blocks it would be 46.5 inches.

After sandwiching and pinning the quilt I used the walking foot to ditch stitch the block edges and quilt diagonal lines across the surface through the colored squares. Only the muslin areas were unquilted. Every morning I chose a different design from Leah's website and sketched it by hand a few times before quilting one of the muslin areas. Warmed up, I'd move to Ocean Waves. This baby quilt was completed in about a month and only took that long because I just quilted one design a day.

Over that month my quilting improved and I finally created my own designs on some of the blocks.